Reflections on Water embodies a pleasant chimera – the lines, the arrangement of branches, are evasive water scouts. Is this water distorting the world? Are these mind collages bewildering our perceptions? Yes, and yes, and they are twins. Trying the crown as roots, tossing a coin about what is rising and falling, deciding that it is irrelevant. Body supports itself on dream – man leans on his notions.

Maria Hall is an artist whose works create a new world before our very eyes, as if it were an hitherto unknown plant kingdom. A world with the nature of a ringing, where sound and silence balance one another with a palette like sap, in this cross sectional world.

Maria Hall’s paintings and drawings are gentle on the observer, they do not impose themselves but are nonetheless imposing in what they portray – an inevitability, transient and compelling like a breath. Strange but not a stranger’s.

This first and immediate touch kindles the memory of a forgotten, not to say never experienced, yet known, meeting. There are enclosures we apparently cannot remember but still carry around. How strange – to be visited by something new that still makes you feel at home.

Ultramarine, zink white, pale ochre, yellow ochre. The palette is rooted. How does it affect me? With shadows and play of light it reveals and opens up a side street, an alternative path alongside the wide, the big, the fast. This passage invades my life with the language and expressions of its nooks and becomes a reference point for my sensations. A painting can greet me as I wander, in town or in my mind, changing the perspective with its Hallesque nuance.

At a distance Maria Hall’s paintings appear misleadingly smooth, almost creamy and lightly scented, but up close they reveal thick layers, grooved and roughly scratched in the soft material. Ditches and creases, compactly conspiring, distorting the motifs into ploughed furrows in a furious soil.

The paintings are ungraspable places that play from out of soil, up from turbid frenzy, raging abbreviation, that hamper more than they express one’s world. Here is something that speaks of the power of the pause without equating it with idle stillness and absence – on the contrary, it is about being near a sincerity where evasive loss and lust are given their say.

is the weather, an electric discharge whose white afterbirth and watering hint at rest without peace. We stand so much in the midst of life with expectations and wishes and see them all burn into white. To reach the bottom is to be in the absolute white, in a vast vertical I where vague shadows, droplets and virtually unnoticeable tremors are born like nameless embryos simply because Nothingness is never entirely wasted. Nothingness cannot abide emptiness.

the weather change is born out of the white shimmer. First as cracks that form their erratic patterns, which soon grow more clearly into trunks and branches – the underpinning of the plant kingdom and also map lines to guide us. Trees want to measure space and are thus transformed into stubborn cartographers. They collaborate in groves, in the doubling of water.

is weather rest. Here it is time to go in hiding. The pulse of growing enters an After, a state of being that must remain with itself. It is a resonance that spreads a dissolved blanket of colour over all motion. The trees and tracks that have worked so hart to safeguard an inner world, draw up the routes, are softened in an earthy rain called contemplation. Heaven and earth try on each other’s clothes to attain a temporary peace.

is the weather guard. From out of the hideaway something will be formed, built. We could give them names, they resemble dwellings in the form of a house, a cliff, a ridge. This is an unyielding place, a homestead, for to There come all the heres, befores and afters, as do the restless networks, the roads, the structures.